Note 162 — Chapter III
Neil Buchanan translation
Footnote 162:
(return)
The statements made in this chapter need special forbearance, especially as the selection from the rich and motley material—cf. only the so-called Apostolic Fathers—the emphasising of this, the throwing into the background of that element, cannot here be vindicated. It is not possible, in the compass of a brief account, to give expression to that elasticity and those oscillations of ideas and thoughts which were peculiar to the Christians of the earliest period. There was indeed, as will be shewn, a complex of tradition in many respects fixed, but this complex was still under the dominance of an enthusiastic fancy, so that what at one moment seemed fixed, in the next had disappeared. Finally, attention must be given to the fact that when we speak of the beginnings of knowledge, the members of the Christian community in their totality are no longer in question, but only individuals who of course were the leaders of the others. If we had no other writings from the times of the Apostolic Fathers than the first Epistle of Clement and the Epistle of Polycarp, it would be comparatively easy to sketch a clear history of the development connecting Paulinism with the old-Catholic Theology as represented by Irenæus, and so to justify the traditional ideas. But besides these two Epistles which are the classic monuments of the mediating tradition, we have a great number of documents which shew us how manifold and complicated the development was. They also teach us how careful we should be in the interpretation of the post-Apostolic documents that immediately followed the Pauline Epistles, and that we must give special heed to the paragraphs and ideas in them, which distinguish them from Paulinism. Besides, it is of the greatest importance that those two Epistles originated in Rome and Asia Minor, as these are the places where we must seek the embryonic stage of old-Catholic doctrine. Numerous fine threads, in the form of fundamental ideas and particular views, pass over from the Asia Minor theology of the post-Apostolic period into the old-Catholic theology.